Cold Fire (20 page)

He chuckled. “I never quite expect pretty girls to possess wit as well.”

By the time I had decided I could not tell if he was teasing me or insulting me, he had walked away. Abby stepped into view, watching him go with a frown. But when she turned to see me trying to tie the cloth, she laughed in a delightful way and showed me how to tuck and fix the fabric to make an ankle-length skirt. I pulled on my damp shift as a blouse.

We stowed tub and buckets in a lean-to. Inside the single room of the house, baskets hung from the rafters and what looked like a pair of fishing nets were strung lengthwise under beams. A bronze pot half filled with water sat in a wire stand, with a pitcher hanging from a hook and a basin tucked beneath. Otherwise, there was no furniture. She unrolled a mat woven from rushes and, after a hesitation, I sat on it.

“Yee wait. I get food.” She went out.

Waiting, hungry, I brooded with my cane across my crossed legs, fingering my locket. Where was Bee? Had she returned safely to Adurnam? Had she found Rory? Touching the locket made me think of Andevai, who had returned it to me. I still had the sard stone. In a strange way, I felt I was saving it for him, and yet the likelihood I would see him again seemed small. I could not be sure if I was relieved or sad at the thought.

From nearby, voices erupted into an argument. It took no great acumen to guess it was Drake at odds with the behica and her noble pupil. Fire mages, all. Including one newly kindled. Was the cacique’s nephew the
power
my sire had spoken of ? Was he, highborn and superior and a foreigner, a man I might hand over in place of Bee without feeling the shame of treachery? Yet fire mages could not become truly powerful, not like cold mages. Wake too much fire, and the fire consumed you.

I hated my sire all over again. To save Bee, I was going to have to hand someone else over in her place. Just as my aunt and uncle had done, when they had given me to Four Moons House. For the first time, I felt a tremor of sympathy for their dilemma.

“Cat’reen?”

My eyes flew open. Abby set down a tray.

“Will you eat with me?” I asked, but she lifted her chin to indicate the negative.

I was ravenous. I choked down four flat grilled rounds that were more cracker than bread. Succulent yams had been baked to perfection with tiny red vegetables whose taste turned my mouth to fire. I gulped down the entire cup of smoky brown liquid, which proved to be a mistake, because it was rum.
Slow down
, I told myself.

All this time, Abby watched me. My hazy memory of my arrival on the beach cleared like clouds parting to reveal the sun. “Are you a fire mage, Abby?”

“Ayi.” No.

“How can you be safe from the salters if you’re not a fire mage?”

Gracious Melqart did not spare me from being a complete ass who could not think before she spoke. There could only be one reason. Quite by instinct, I scooted away from her.

She looked down, shoulders slumping.

“Oh, Blessed Tanit,” I muttered. “I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry.”

Lamplight spilled through the door. Drake entered, a lamp in one hand and a gourd bottle in the other. “Is something wrong, Cat?”

“Does Abby have the salt plague?”

Maybe it was the way the lamplight lanced through the room, but for an instant the girl looked like a dead thing, skin the wrong color, lacking the blood that gives life. She sucked in a sob.

“That was rude,” Drake said. “I thought better of you, Cat. Abby’s no danger to you.”

“Cat’reen mean no rudeness,” Abby said quickly.

I clamped my lips tight over excuses. “I was rude and thoughtless. My apologies.”

He hung the lamp from a hook, caught Abby’s arm, and pressed a kiss on her forehead as a father might kiss a child. “Be patient a day longer, Abby.”

“I so scared,” she said, and my heart cracked.

“I gave you my promise, Abby. Now go.”

She shuffled out with the tray. Drake sat down beside me, unsealed the round bottle, and filled my cup with liquor. He drained the cup, then filled it again and offered it to me.

I gulped it all down, the rum smooth in my throat. “It’s so horrible.”

“More horrible than you know. The salt plague drove out tens of thousands of refugees from the Malian Empire and other parts of West Africa. I’m sure many died as they fled. Most went north to make new lives among Celts and Romans, for the salt plague is rare in Europa. Some say winter kills it. Some in Europa even say the plague was a good thing.” He filled the cup with more rum.

“How could they say that?”

“The salt plague brought the West African Mande and the northwestern Celts together. The mages and sorcerers among the Mande and the Celts found they had a great deal in common, and thus the mage Houses were created. As these cold mages amassed power, they bound more and more villages into clientage until with the power of their magic and the power of the law, they rule like princes.”

I did not want to discuss cold mages, clientage, and the law. “Drake, Abby seemed surprised when that salter bit me. Does that mean he was in the harmless phase before and not yet biting?”

Judging by the upward quirk of his lips and eyebrows, I had surprised him. “Yes. Had you spoken to him yesterday, he would have seemed as normal as you or me except halting in speech and lame. Something kicked him into the active phase. Maybe your blood.”

“I did not!” I drained the cup as if the taste could drive out the memory of the bite.

“I’m not blaming you! It’s unpredictable. The harmless phase, more properly known as the infestation phase, can last days or months or in rare cases years. Yet between one breath and the next, the border is crossed. Poor Abby knows the disease is eating away at her mind and body—”

“Stop!” I grabbed the bottle out of his hand and took a slug. I had drunk too much too quickly, but I was exhausted and disoriented and hot. To think of Abby made me sick at heart.

He took the bottle with a shake of his head. “You have a tender heart.”

“Much good my tears do for her! Why haven’t you healed her?”

“Abby’s family are plantation workers in the cane fields. It took too long to get her to a behique. Her blood was infested before they got there.”

“But if a behique could do nothing, what do you think you could do now?”

Passion makes a man attractive, so the poets say, and he blazed with purpose in a way that seemed attractively admirable. “Something they don’t want me to do.”

“Why would they not want you to save her?”

“Do you know how dangerous fire magic is, Cat? To the fire mage, I mean.”

“I’m no fire mage, but I’ve read that fire mages usually are consumed by their own fire.” I met his gaze, realizing how close he sat beside me. “Did you risk your life to heal mine?”

He considered me in silence. Then his mouth turned down in a way that sparked my interest. He leaned back onto an elbow. “I suppose I did. I didn’t think about it at the time. Anyway, under Taino law, any person bitten by a salter must be quarantined on Salt Island.”

“Unless they’re healed. That’s what you told me.”

He poured more rum. “No. Any person bitten by a salter, whether healed or infested. The law dates from the arrival of people from Europa and Africa. It was part of the original treaty that allowed the Malian fleet to set up the independent territory and city of Expedition on the island of Kiskeya. By ruthlessly enforcing the quarantine, the caciques stopped the disease—and other diseases that came with the fleet—from spreading as much as they would otherwise have done.”

“Are you telling me I can’t ever leave this island?”

“No, I’m telling you I have plans to get you off this island. You must keep your mouth shut about this conversation and especially about my association with Camjiata. Don’t tell anyone. Be patient, like Abby. When I tell you to act, act immediately, no questions. Can you promise me that?”

“What choice do I have? Drake, what day is it?”

“The second of Augustus. As we Celts say, Lughnasad.”

Seven full months
had passed while I had floundered in the spirit world. Lughnasad was one of the cross-quarter days. Was that why I’d been drawn back at just this time?

“How did you get here, that you don’t know what day it is?” he asked.

With a racing heart and a stab of fear, I suddenly realized I could not answer the question even had I wanted to. “How do you think people commonly arrive in the Antilles?”

He took a swig from the bottle and offered it to me. When I hesitated, he lifted it to my lips. He had a delicate touch, and the rum did calm me. “Come now, Cat. There can be no reason I could have expected to see you ever again, much less on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from Adurnam.”

I felt like a cornered rat, but I had to say something. “I was kidnapped. I ended up here.”

“Floating in the sea?” He laughed. “Did you get thrown off the ship or did you jump?”

“Since I can’t swim and I am terrified of water, why would you think I would jump?”

“Since I don’t know, you have to tell me.” He glanced heavenward and then back to me. “That’s why I asked.”

The secret belongs to those who remain silent, as Andevai had once said to me. “It’s too painful. I’m not ready.”

An expression brushed by a glimmer of impatience creased his face and vanished into a gentler smile. “When do you think you might be ready, Cat?”

Sitting in the dark house with him reclining so close beside me made the memory of our sexual congress by the pool very strong. I was adrift and restless, and I just did not want to be alone.

“Did you think it was nice?” I whispered.

For a few anxious, embarrassed breaths, I wasn’t sure he had understood me.

“Ah!” A warmer smile softened his mouth.

He leaned in to kiss my lips, his moist with liquor and mine no different. I needed someone to cling to, and anyway it felt so good, even on a mat on a floor.

“I have to go,” he said afterward, rising and pulling on his clothes. “Salters are most active at night.” He lit a glass-shuttered candle set on a shelf fixed to the wall by the door. “There are centipedes and scorpions. You’d best sleep in the hammock.”

Then he was gone. I barred the door as I wondered what a hammock was. The gleam offered enough illumination for me to use basin and pitcher to wash myself with water drawn from the big bronze pot. I pulled on my shift and drawers so as to be decently covered. The air inside the chamber was like hot viscous porridge. How could I possibly sleep?

Fingers scratched at the barred door. Had my heart not been firmly embedded in my chest, it would have slammed back and forth around the room like a rabbit gone wild. After the rabbit calmed down, I picked up my sword and leaned an ear against the door.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Abby.”

As my left hand tightened on the hilt, my right crept to my throat. The only sound I could get out was a soft “
Gaaah.
”

“I not here to bite yee. Mebbe after we chat.”

Horribly, we both started giggling. I fumbled with the bar, set it aside, and opened the door.

She slipped in. “I don’ have permission to walk out at night. They put we in di pens. Most times dat change come at night.”

“Sit down. Although it’s horribly hot in here.”

She looked surprised. “Think yee so? If yee want, we go up a di roof.”

I laced on my bodice, and she tied the pagne for me. We climbed a rope ladder and settled side by side on a ledge rimmed with a railing. I sat cross-legged with my sword across my thighs. The clouds were breaking up, mottling the sky. Waves soughed on the beach. The sound was restful until you began to wonder if the steady lift and drag of the waves was really the breathing sleep of leviathan.

“When were you bit?” I asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind speaking of it.”

“I don’ mind. Dat bite sit on me thoughts all di time. Di teeth of di ghouls eat me.”

“Are there ghouls here? I thought they only lived beneath the sands in the Sahara Desert.”

“Dey behiques tell dis story. First time, di salt miners in dat place Mali broke open dat ghoul nest. Di ghouls wake and dey bite. Dey left dey teeth in di miners. Dem teeth a go eating all through every person, every man and gal dat wen bitten. One person bite another person and dey ghoul teeth keep eating on and on.”

“Blessed Tanit.” I took her hand in mine.

A howl that like of a beast with its leg caught in a trap rose from behind us, and fell away.

“What was that?” I am sure the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

“After di teeth eat yee mind, yee don’ have no more thoughts. But mebbe for one moment yee wake up and yee remember and dat make yee scream. Don’ cry, Cat’reen.”

I wiped my cheeks. “It’s so terrible.”

“I mean, yee tears have salt.” I felt her lick her lips, as if she wanted to lick my cheeks to taste the salt of my tears but had enough control to restrain herself.

With an effort, I kept hold of her hand and did not shift away. “If Drake can heal you, why hasn’t he done so already?”

She remained silent for a long time. He had kissed her forehead, so it wasn’t as if he recoiled from touching her. Far out over the sea, a light winked and vanished. Perhaps it was the lamp of the moon shining on the water, for where the clouds shredded away at the zenith, a quarter moon watched. Under its light, Abby’s skin took on a peculiar crystalline gleam, and her eyes showed no irises, only a flat white circle.

“I don’ like dat dis man Drake decide so quick to make yee he sweet gal.”

“I said yes! He didn’t force me, if that’s what you mean.” A certain giddiness, and the rum, still warmed my flesh. Yet a new uneasiness crept like gossipy whispers along my ears. Now that I was no longer terrified and disoriented, it seemed unlikely that the only way for a fire mage to heal someone was to have sexual congress with them. Had I mistaken his words? Because I certainly hadn’t mistaken his intentions. “He told me that to heal me he had to touch my skin with his.”

Startlingly, she laughed. “Di kiss of life. We call it by dat name. But I reckon dat maku give yee di kiss of life and den take a little something more.”

“Bold Astarte!” I muttered.
A little something more.

Abby patted my arm. “Dem fire mages reckon dey can take what dey want. So he tell you dat, and den he get you drunk and he take it all. I don’ like it.”

“Oh,” I whispered. “Was I an idiot?”

“Not a bit like dat, Cat’reen!” Her quiet compassion shamed me, for in the midst of her own terror she had opened her heart to feel for me. “If dat man said so to me, right after I got bit, I a done di same as yee for dat chance he heal me. But I don’ like it.”

I leaned against her as I often leaned against Bee, and her smile was all the gift I could ask for.

Out of the darkness, a male voice spoke.

“Salve, Perdita.”

Abby hid her face behind crossed hands in an awkward genuflect. I looked over the railing to see two figures standing below. One was a stocky adolescent wearing as ornament a blocky stone collar. The other was a man perhaps ten years older than me with impressively heavy gold armbands on his bare upper arms and a gold pendant around his neck. He was dressed in white cloth draped over his body something in the manner of a Roman toga. He looked oddly familiar, and not just because I thought he was one of the mages I had faced on the beach.

“I intend to speak with you. I will climb up so we may have privacy.” The man spoke in a formal Latin whose antiquated flavor heightened the princely expectation that he was not asking but telling me.

Abby quivered but did not speak.

I had faced down the Master of the Wild Hunt with his evil crows, monstrous toads, frozen minions, and masked face. For that matter, I had dealt with Andevai Diarisso Haranwy. I knew how to handle a young man who might be arrogant, vain, and besides that a bit of an ass.

“We have not been formally introduced. In my country, a proper introduction is necessary before a man and a woman who are in no other way acquainted may speak to each other. But in deference to what I am informed is your exalted station in life, I will certainly agree to speak to you as long as my companion is allowed to climb down and go on her way unmolested and unpunished.”

Just as different fabrics have different textures, silence can display various qualities. In this case, I was sure that if astonishment were like rain, it would have been pouring sheets.

Yet he replied in the tone he had used before. “Your conditions prove acceptable, Perdita.”

Abby’s dry lips brushed my cheek, and she clambered down the ladder and tottered off.

My interlocutor climbed up and crouched beside me. Straight coal-black hair fell loose down his back. His dark eyes smoldered with the suggestion of buried heat. “You have a name.”

“I do have a name. You have a name as well.”

He blinked, as at an unexpected drop of rain in his eye. “I have learned to speak the Europan tongue. Perhaps I speak wrongly and you do not comprehend. Your name I wish to know.”

“In my country, it is usual for people to introduce their names each to the other. So if I say that my name is Catherine Bell Barahal, then you would say, ‘Greetings’ and afterward you would tell me by what name I can call you.”

“Perdita, it is not possible for you to speak to me as one of my kin. You must address me in the proper way.”

“Because you are a king’s nephew? He is not my king. We have no kings in Europa.”

“But many princes and generals, the histories tell. Perhaps for this reason you fight so much.”

“There is no answer to that! I feel obliged to remind you that you are the one who wanted to talk to me. I mean no offense.”

It seemed he had taken none, for all this time his manner had not changed. He was beginning to seem less like an arrogant and proud man and more like a reserved and formal one. “You speak with bold words. And you carry a
cemi
with you. Are you of noble birth?”

“What is a cemi?”

“It is that person you hold, who shows her power at night.” He indicated the sword.

“Why do you call it a person?”

“Perhaps you have a different name. Here, we say you are accompanied by one of your ancestors. This person travels with you in the form of a three-pointed blade.”

Even Andevai hadn’t been able to see the sword unless I unsheathed it, but it appeared fire mages could see it at any time. “You see it as a blade?”

“A puzzling question. I see what it is.”

“What do you mean by three-pointed? It has only two, the hilt and the tip.”

“This person has two points in this world, as you say, but a third point in the other world.”

Which was true enough, if you considered the hidden blade the third point. Could a person’s spirit live in cold steel? As some memory of the spirit of Vai’s grandmother might reside in the stone I had picked up, could some part of my mother’s strength reside in the sword? I stroked the hilt, wondering if her spirit walked with me, and it seemed I felt an icy radiance and a trembling sense as of a thin wall that kept me apart from the vast and echoing landscape of the spirit world.

“I wonder why a maku carries a cemi,” he went on. “Also, never have I met and spoken to a woman from across the sea. You are disrespectful, but I think that is just your way. My mother the
cacica
tells me I will marry a woman from across the sea. Maybe it will be you.” He did not speak the words lasciviously. He said it as he might remark that rain clouds presaged rain.

“I think it unlikely it will be me.” Two could play this game. “You call your mother the cacica. Is she queen? I thought your uncle was king.”

“My uncle is very ill. Because of his illness, my mother, who is his sister, rules as cacica.”

“Ah. I understand now. Then I expect a princely clan from Europa will send a princely daughter to seal a princely pact between your two noble houses. That daughter would not be me.”

Yet I eyed him, feeling quite like a vulture as I did so. Was his fire magic enough to attract the Wild Hunt? Could I sacrifice him to save Bee?

From the foot of the ladder, the stocky adolescent spoke in Taino.

A glimmer like the breath of a firefly resolved into James Drake and his lamp. Upon finding the door of the house unlocked and unguarded, he came around to the back.

“Here you are,” he said with a frown as he held up the lamp to examine us.

The prince regarded Drake with a splendid display of indifference.

Drake’s lamp flared. “What is Prince Caonabo doing here?”

“Why do you think I am obliged to answer for my actions to you?” I asked.

We spoke in the mixed speech common to northwest Europa, not in the formal Latin of the schoolroom, and my face was surely so red that its heat alone might have lit the night. Prince Caonabo glanced at me, then climbed down. He and his companion walked away into the night.

“Well,” Drake said grudgingly, “it isn’t as if he could be trying to seduce you.”

I thought of Abby’s words. “You would know, I suppose.”

“Dear me, Cat. Have I done anything to provoke such a mean-spirited reply? I only meant that a nephew of the supreme ruler is not in the business of marrying the daughter of an impoverished Phoenician mercenary house. But we have to speak of this later. Where is Abby?”

She would not get into trouble on my account! “Why do you think I know where she is?”

He sighed. “Your insistence on being contrary in every answer is really quite annoying, Cat. A woman who is always contrary is unlikely to please a husband.”

I experienced a sudden and painful revelation that it was important to converse with a man before you became intimate with him, or else never to converse with him afterward. “I am sorry to inform you that not every woman wants a husband.”

“You’re very young. And very naïve.”

I felt my ears turn to steam. “All the better to be taken advantage of ?”

The wick flared again, flame licking upward in a flash. Yes, he was definitely angry, and not in a way I found amusing. “Is that what you think? That I took advantage of you?”

I pinched my lips together. I had to accept that Abby was right: I had been bitten, and he had healed me. Anyone would have said yes. He had also promised to get me off this cursed island, on which I was, evidently, meant to be trapped for the rest of my life. I could be caged at the vast estate of Four Moons House in more gilded comfort than this! Best to keep silence.

He went on. “I saved your life, Cat. At considerable risk to my own! Do you know why Prince Caonabo walks everywhere with his young cousin?”

“How could I know that?”

“A rhetorical question, I assume. Really, Cat. This affectation of showing opposition to everything becomes ridiculous and does not do you any credit for you seem otherwise a sensible girl. Naturally, fire mages are rare. They are so revered among the Taino that even mages born among the
naborias
—we would call them the plebeians—are married into the noble clans. Each fire mage is given a catch-fire. The great risk of being a fire mage is that you overextend your power—”

“And burn up,” I finished. Yet I had felt his magic not as fire but as tendrils snaking through me, drawing my desire out of its innocent sleep.

“And burn up. I wish you would not interrupt me.”

“You have no catch-fire?”

“Who would volunteer to be my catch-fire? Would you?”

My fingers tightened on the railing. “Wouldn’t it be an awful way to die?”

“To burn to death? I don’t intend to find out. Anyway, in Expedition Territory, it is forbidden by law for any fire mage to employ or enslave a person as a catch-fire.”

“Is the prince’s catch-fire a slave?”

“No, he is a cousin. That is his family duty. Among the Taino, catch-fires are honored. If they die, as they often do, they become a god—as we might say—and their skull—if a skull is left—is woven into a figure of power which the Taino call a cemi.”

I lowered my gaze to the gleam of my sword. “Prince Caonabo said my sword was a cemi.”